Concluding Thoughts

This brief concluding chapter draws the threads of the previous chapters together. Previous work on human decision-making has tended to conclude that rationality is a scarce resource and most cognition is arational or irrational. Pushback against this view has come from proponents of ecological rationality. They concede, in effect, that our decision-making is irrational, inasmuch as it fails to respond to good information, but argue that it is rational in a broader sense: we better achieve our epistemic goals by believing arationally. This chapter argues that the evidence surveyed in the previous chapters shows that this is false: we respond rationally to the higher-order evidence we’re presented with, and there’s therefore no need to appeal to ecological rationality to defend our self-image as rational agents. Once we recognize the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence, we can vindicate something very like the Enlightenment picture of ourselves as rational animals.